The latest Westworld Season 2 trailer promises that “the reckoning is here,” and part of that reckoning also includes a pretty badass classical rendition of the iconic Nirvana jam “Heart-Shaped Box.” Westworld still loves its piano-driven, slowed-down versions of grungy classic rock songs that have the word “black” in the lyrics somewhere.
HBO released a new trailer for Westworld Season 2 on Thursday, and in it, we hear a mournful version of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” in a slower tempo driven mainly by piano, with an orchestra joining in later. In its first season, Westworld delivered tons of delicious piano covers of songs that includes the likes of “Black Hole Sun” and “Paint It Black,” so adding Nirvana among the ranks of Soundgarden and the Rolling Stones makes perfect sense. Also consider the following lyric from “Heart-Shaped Box,” which is Westworld AF: “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black.”
This new trailer is all about the many Hosts from the Westworld park struggling to keep their sentience and achieve full independence from their creators. One thing’s for sure, the full-blown revolution is finally here. This uprising will also see Maeve go to Shogunworld. But Ed Harris’s older Man in Black also says, “I’m gonna burn this whole thing to the ground.” Which, to be fair, also sounds like it could be a Nirvana lyric.
In Charles Cross’s Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, he wrote that the lyric “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black” was essentially “the most convoluted route any songwriter undertook in pop history to say ‘I love you’.” In a convoluted way, the song is a love song about Cobain’s wife Courtney Love, who once asserted the song was about her vagina.
Westworld has a pretty solid relationship with music in the past, so this awesome cover has us hopeful that Season 2 will deliver more great song covers.
Westworld Season 2 will premiere on April 22.
